The present invention relates generally to computer application programs and data consolidation techniques, and more particularly, to an application adaptable system and method of consolidating data contained within multiple spreadsheets.
In modern business, various metrics reports are routinely produced and distributed in the form of electronic spreadsheets, which are typically created using one of several commonly known spreadsheet and query software programs, such as those from Microsoft® Corporation and others including Quattro Pro™ and Lotus 123™. The spreadsheets may be located within one or more workbooks and may include for example supervisor, manager, and employee names and site locations, as well as identification, serial, code, revenue, and sales numbers.
Often the reports are produced at some regular time interval i.e. daily or weekly. When a user needs to analyze data within multiple reports across a time span greater than for example a week, data from individual reports must be consolidated into a single electronic format, such as a spreadsheet having desired data from each individual report.
Unfortunately, this consolidation is usually done manually, with the user opening each individual report, selecting desired data from each report, and copying the desired data into a new or common spreadsheet. Consolidation in this manner is inefficient, especially for large or complex data sets and complex or numerously repeated operations.
Several tabular consolidation and aggregation techniques currently exist. These techniques typically include aggregation of values from multiple tables to generate a single table. One such example is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,272,628, by Koss. Although, these known techniques provide an efficient method of aggregating tabular values, they do not provide capability for manipulating spreadsheets or for combining various desired portions of spreadsheets in such a manner as to provide a consolidated report having a desired or custom arrangement of information.
Also, current tabular consolidation and aggregation techniques are not application flexible but rather are application specific. In order to apply a currently designed consolidation technique to a different application, software code of the technique needs to be manually reconfigured or rewritten to accommodate a newly introduced application. Current techniques do not allow an end user to select desired portions of specified spreadsheets for consolidation nor do they allow a user to select arrangement of a final report before generation thereof.
It would therefore be desirable to develop a system and method of efficiently consolidating multiple spreadsheets that provides flexibility in selection of the spreadsheets and portions thereof and allows for arrangement and configuration selection of a final or end.